Apache OpenOffice

[T@T]

Anyone try this? I lost office 2010.

[Traditional_Ale]

Its not perfect, but the price is right!

[T@T]

Originally Posted by Traditional_Ale

Its not perfect, but the price is right!

Tell you what, I never sure about any free product and I only played a few minutes with Word and Excel but it opens wayyy faster than Office and edited an excel spreadsheet with ease.

Even if I find my office I may not bother to reload it.

[ricosuave]

do you still have the key for 2010? cause I can burn you a disk no problem

but, open office works great, never had any problems with it

[calgarygringo]

Open Office is pretty good and I do have it on the laptop I am typing right now and my wifes. We did look at it to use at my last employer for all those that don't use office programs a lot but we still needed licences. I did the testing and did find several areas of incompatibility. Non major but for those not very savvy could be a challenge. There is another freebie is called WPS Office I find has less issues than OpenOffice and use it occasionally as well. All are available for tablets, cell and home computing.Kingsoft is the old version of this one and was a chinese knockoff of MS Office.

[Hugh Jahrmes]

I've ised it on and off for years and usually install it for friends as a default if im reformatting / fixit their PCs

Edit: whoops, half post.

Always thought it does a good job in a pinch, and has saved quite a few friends who didn't have cash for office at the time and dont agree with software piracy. Kinda surprised MS allows products like this to circulate, although I'm not sure exactly what their property rights cover

[Mass_nerder]

I used it for 3-4 years and was quite happy with it, but I downloaded their newest version, and I'm done with it. Just repeatedly crashed, causing me to lose significant work a few times.

[BloodFetish]

I've used LibreOffice myself, and we have it sprinkled around our company as well.

LibreOffice is a development fork of OpenOffice from a few years ago - at the time a lot of the community was pissed at the sponser (Oracle? Sun?) and a lot of the developers followed the forked version.

It's great if you don't need to exchange files with MS Office users, especially if there's lots of complicated formatted or macros. Simple documents are usually not a problem.

[EldrickOnIce]

Originally Posted by BloodFetish

It's great if you don't need to exchange files with MS Office users, especially if there's lots of complicated formatted or macros. Simple documents are usually not a problem.

^This

[DoubleF]

Open office feels like using office 2003 for me. Unless they updated the interface recently.

It's generally a great program in lieu of MSOffice for personal use. Not really a good replacement for most business' purposes though.

I'll have to test out Libreoffice.

[T@T]

Originally Posted by DoubleF

Open office feels like using office 2003 for me. Unless they updated the interface recently.

It's generally a great program in lieu of MSOffice for personal use. Not really a good replacement for most business' purposes though.

I'll have to test out Libreoffice.

I was going to say 2007 which is more than I need anyway, I got the newest 4.1.1 version, so far a few hours on some MS excel/word files and zero problems.

Not sure what I'm more happy about, the way this freebie works or that I didn't run out and buy another bloated version of MSOffice (and I was 5 minutes away from doing so.)

[nfotiu]

Wasn't office 2003 better than whatever modern version I have on my work pc anyway?

I've been using google docs at home for a couple years now since I've been on the Chromebook bandwagon. Not everything you'd need for business needs, but I find I can do most everything I want to in docs and spreadsheets. Also working on the cloud is such a better way to go for so many reasons. The apps are also improving significantly every year.

[DoubleF]

I think 2003 was the last year they used the regular task bar interface which open office and Libre office use. 2007 and after I believe used the Ribbon interface.

I just booted up Libreoffice. It seems similar to openoffice but seems a little faster to me. Interface looks almost the same. I'm not identifying any obvious differences. I think going forward, I might use Libreoffice instead of open office.

[rbochan]

Anything's better than the most recent MS Office. Uglier than all hell.

[Rathji]

If you use one of these options, do yourself a favor and change the default file save type to a MS compatible one, (like .doc, .xls, and .ppt), so people you send files to dont hate you.

[Bobblehead]

Originally Posted by BloodFetish

I've used LibreOffice myself, and we have it sprinkled around our company as well.

LibreOffice is a development fork of OpenOffice from a few years ago - at the time a lot of the community was pissed at the sponser (Oracle? Sun?) and a lot of the developers followed the forked version.

It's great if you don't need to exchange files with MS Office users, especially if there's lots of complicated formatted or macros. Simple documents are usually not a problem.

Sun "sponsored" Open Office, and when Sun was purchased by Oracle a lot of the developers forked to Libre Office. They weren't happy with how Oracle appeared to be strong-arming using other open source projects they had control over (java).

Oracle has since decided it had no role with Open Office and donated it to Apache. Hence the current Apache Open Office.

[Jimmy Stang]

I use LibreOffice for my personal stuff as I can't justify paying for MS Office for what little I use it for. I left OpenOffice during the Oracle debacle and haven't looked back, but I'd consider checking out ApacheOffice at some point.

On its own, it does everything that I need. Basic documents, spreadsheets, etc. I use PC and Mac, and it is cross-platform, which is nice. I don't collaborate with others with my documents, so if I'm sending a document to someone, it goes as a PDF.

It works "OK" with basic MS Office documents and spreadsheets. It can open .doc and .docx just fine, and save to them, and basic formatting is generally retained. I have had a few situations where I have opened a document and it was clearly not looking right, and after opening it at work on Word, it looked fine.

So if you're going to use it for a majority of personal documents with little need to share, then it should work just fine. But use caution when sharing Word/Excel docs with others because it might not look right on their end, even though it looks fine in LibreOffice (and vice versa).

[DoubleF]

Agree with Jimmy.

Also, in my experience, Open office opening power points made in MSOffice is often a complete cluster####. Things look completely messed up.

Also agree about the changing of the default file format.